Refresh pillar
Find existing pages that have decayed — content shrunk, gone stale, or lost traffic — and refresh them in place. The Refresh pillar surfaces the queue and pre-fills a brief so you can refresh without starting from scratch.
How decay is detected
After every crawl, each page is scored against four signals. A page with one or more flags is "decaying" and lands in the queue.
| Flag | Trigger | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Changed | Most recent crawl saw the content hash differ from the prior crawl | Page was edited — worth confirming the change is intentional and on-strategy |
| Shrunk | ≥20% fewer words than the previous version | Significant content loss usually means a section was deleted by mistake or thin replacement copy |
| Stale | Page hasn't changed in 180+ days | Likely contains outdated facts, dates, prices, or competitive claims |
| Traffic loss | Tracked keywords show recoverable estimated monthly traffic compared to a prior snapshot | Specific, measurable opportunity — refresh the page to recover the lost rankings |
The refresh queue
Site nav → Refresh. Pages are sorted by priority (sum of flag scores plus a traffic-recoverable bonus). Stats at the top show counts per flag and total tracked keywords. Click any page to see its decay detail: signals, version diff, tracked keywords, and recoverable traffic.
Keyword discovery
The traffic-loss flag depends on tracked keyword data. Click Discover keywords on the queue page to dispatch one DataForSEO Labs request per page. Discovery has a cooldown to keep API costs predictable; the button shows when the next run becomes available.
Refreshing a page
From any decay-detail page or from Pages → page detail, click Refresh this page. This:
- Opens the brief intake pre-filled with the page's top tracked keyword and a URL-guessed archetype
- Sets the brief's
page_idto this page (refresh briefs are tagged throughout the UI) - Carries through to the resulting draft — drafts from refresh briefs are counted in Pages refreshed on Reports → Pulse
How decay scores stay current
- End of every crawl — automatically rescored once the crawl completes
- Nightly at 03:15 server time — Laravel scheduler re-runs decay scoring for every verified, crawled site
- Decay scoring is free — no external API calls. It only queries existing PageVersion + TrackedKeyword data.
Decay scoring runs nightly, but recrawls (which generate new PageVersion snapshots) stay user-initiated because each crawl costs API credits. Run a recrawl from the site overview when you want fresh decay data.